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Bottoms Up!

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Book Review by Gene Bild   I’ve long thought an anthology by a range of ex-addicts and other sober folk telling their life stories was overdue. It’s now arrived as a graphic novel and that’s surely icing on the cake. Forty-four mostly anonymous souls were paired with cartoonists and then bared all, delivering gripping tales of sad descent and then some measure of redemption. I binge-read Bottoms Up! cover to cover in one sitting and here mention a few of its highlights. Accepting the premise that these are first person narratives, the mere fact of their telling implies the recovery,… Read More

Alcohol Addiction: a Memoir and a Fiction

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Guest Review by Gene Bild Books relating personal battles with drugs and alcohol naturally tend to feature the authors as characters. While Ollmann distances himself somewhat by fabricating a stand-in alter ego named Caleb Wyatt, Nagata renders her harrowing warts-and-all story of hospitalization and eventual semi-recovery realistically. The two stories are quite different in tone. Nagata’s story is a memoir, an account of her several-year binge and eventual hospitalization. Not only is Ollmann’s novel fiction, but he ensures our awareness of this with the book’s title. Ollmann’s book is gently playful and quite funny, and not the dark whistle-as-you-pass-the-graveyard humor… Read More

Hey, Kiddo

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Guest Review by Kaitlin R. Weed     Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction depicts the childhood of comic artist Jarret J. Krosoczka while his family was managing his mother’s dependence on drugs.   Krosoczka’s loose and effortless art style pairs perfectly with the ink brush. Characters are center stage because backgrounds are uncomplicated and ink washes. Each character design is simple yet distinct, allowing for maximum expression and emotions. An example of the style aiding emotions is on page 133, when Krosoczka’s grandfather, Joe, finally explains to him about his mother’s… Read More

Operation Pokies

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Guest review by Gene Bild   Set in New Zealand, where the author lives and has a psychiatric therapy practice, Operation Pokies opens with adult animal characters bemoaning the malign effects that pokies (the word in New Zealand for slot machines) have on their village and personal lives. Then the story segues into a children’s crusade in which cute animal children and their insect allies, disgusted and angered by the way pokies have warped their lives, take action and dump all their villages’ slot machines into the ocean. The Amazon site for the eBook gives some startling statistics, without citation,… Read More

The High Points of Sobriety

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Guest Review by Gene Bild The High Points of Sobriety: A Comical Guide to Addiction Recovery by Tony Rubino (comic strip creator of Daddy’s Home) could be classified as an illustrated book, though I’d call it a paperback-sized coffee table book, a collection of mostly one-sentence “inspirational” sobriety gags, on the order of “when you sober up you won’t [insert shocking bon mot] anymore.” Each page is headed with the bolded phrase “Reasons to Stay Sober” possibly because any poor soul stumbling onto this book will need constant reminding of why they are wasting their time with it. Here’s a… Read More

Come Home, Indio

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Come Home, Indio is the story of the author’s life. This memoir begins with tales of parental love and gut-wrenching instances of family drunkenness, and arcs through Mr. Terry’s own drinking years, eventual recovery and ends with the protagonist finding a kind of peaceful resolution, finally coming home by becoming a water protector fighting the DAPL oil pipeline in North Dakota.